Tech.eu Podcast - Robert Falck (Einride) and Rudi Skogman (Blok) - This episode is a few weeks old but I found the interviews in the autonomous trucks sector and Finland’s startup scene interesting tech.eu #
Managing my dotfiles as a git repository - The author uses an interesting technique I hadn’t seen before of making his entire $HOME directory a git repo drewdevault.com #
Awesome Newsletters - A curated list of awesome newsletters github.com #
Vaughan Oliver, Graphic Designer for Pixies, Cocteau Twins, and More, Dead at 62 pitchfork.com #
How Many Websites Should We Build? (In the context of handling desktop browser and also mobile requests) css-tricks.com #
Software development 450 words per minute (2017) - What it’s like to code websites when you are blind, pretty interesting to read about a typical blind dev setup and workflow vincit.fi #
The author of the previous post shares his updated setup in this HN thread, he is using VSCode and Eclipse editors now news.ycombinator.com #
Why working from home is good for business - Matt Mullenweg from Automattic (makers of Wordpress) makes a good case for distributed-first companies ted.com #
The Joys of UNIX Keyboards donatstudios.com #
Common Javascript Promise mistakes every beginner should know and avoid - I liked this article, I’m still on the whole not loving Javascript Promises though, there are all these weird edge cases with error handling, the logic get split into several different places with async functions, try/catch blocks, resolve/reject, the flow control is just not as comprehensive as caolan/async, and in a lot of cases I think it’s not much better in terms of ledgeability and as a defense against callback hell - callbacks for all the complaints are simple and IMO quite wysiwyg, easy to step through in a debugger - Currently I much prefer callbacks to Promises, at least in nodejs, I find it weird that everyone is mad for Promises gosink.in #
How To Move Git Commits From One Branch to Another spkaa.com #
A personal API - Interesting idea, it would be cool to see something like this take off blog.webb.page #
A brutal year - how the 'techlash' caught up with Facebook, Google and Amazon theguardian.com #
In what scope are module variables stored in node.js? - Useful to know how code in a module gets wrapped stackoverflow.com #
Strongly typed vs More-strongly typed - Interesting article that goes a bit deep but not too deep and neatly avoids the weeds, I don’t currently use types in any of the Javascript I write (i.e Typescript) - It’s not that I won’t use types, it’s that so far I haven’t seen enough benefit to using them, if I do then I want to properly understand the trade-offs, because I think in a lot of cases it’s not worth it - Also I really like that in javascript types are optional docs.google.com #
Google’s Monopoly is Stifling Free Software medium.com #
California is rewriting the rules of the internet - Businesses are scrambling to keep up - Similar to GDPR in the EU but this set of regulations is called California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and will be rolled out by July 2020 latimes.com #
"server" is hard to define - this article does a really good job of demystifying a word we use a lot in the computer industry, it turns out it means quite a lot of different things depending on the context, people who work with computers everyday tend to have internalised all the different meanings and automatically switch depending on the context (often without realising), but for newbies and people outside the industry that can be quite confusing jvns.ca #
Guido van Rossum exits Python Steering Committee - This happened last month but I guess is somewhat of a big deal discuss.python.org #
This article about running a modern pizza business(es) was pretty fascinating berkeleyside.com #
Netflix was the best-performing stock of the decade, delivering a more than 4,000% return cnbc.com #
Why npm lockfiles can be a security blindspot for injecting malicious modules snyk.io #
Simulating physical reality with a quantum computer - I had high hopes for this article because it appeared to actually try to solve something useful other than crypto, but by about 1/2 way through its all a jumble of maths notation, complex numbers, matrices and other quantumish - All I could think about as I was reading this was how wonderful JavaScript and JSON are ahelwer.ca #
How we can protect truth in the age of misinformation ted.com #
Smashing Podcast Episode 2 With Liz Elcoate - What’s So Great About Freelancing? - It’s nice to find a web development podcast with some british accents because everyone seems to be american these days smashingmagazine.com #
Microplastic pollution is raining down on city dwellers theguardian.com #
Why Open Hardware on Its Own Doesn’t Solve the Trust Problem - Worth taking the time to read this article IMO bunniestudios.com #
When We Fail To Understand Privacy As A Set Of Trade-Offs, Everyone's 'Solutions' Are Unhelpful techdirt.com #
Why's It Called Stratford International If It Has No International Trains? londonist.com #
Why I love Coding in C - A programmer’s ode to writing computer programs in C, a nice description of the feeling of being ‘close to the bare metal’ lord-left.github.io #
Dropbox Transfer - a new file delivery tool from Dropbox - “Send large files to anyone” dropbox.com #
What's it like to bootstrap a business before it can financially support you? indiehackers.com #
It s a Wonderful Life (1946) m.youtube.com #
My Business Card Runs Linux thirtythreeforty.net #
Beatles trivia - Strawberry Fields Forever is actually two completely different mixes welded together in the middle beatlesbible.com #
‘Advertising breaks your spirit' - the French cities trying to ban public adverts - I liked this piece, it gives a nice snapshot of the perception of advertising in France, which is similar to in other parts of the world but with some french peculiarities theguardian.com #
Researchers Have Identified 100 Mysteriously Disappeared Stars in The Night Sky sciencealert.com #
Kutt is a modern URL shortener with support for custom domains - shorten URLs, manage your links and view the click rate statistics - Written in Nodejs github.com #
Travis Kalanick is leaving Uber’s board of directors, he has sold 90% of his shares worth a total of $2.5 billion theverge.com #
Minimalism - Likely the most undervalued development skill volument.com #
Chatroulette Was Shorthand for Chaos Online - Then Came the 2010s - I had completely forgot about Chatroulette, probably one of the last big OMG inspiring websites, it was this perfectly imperfect combination of simplicity, connection, with a bit of the chaoticness of MySpace, but kind of risqué wired.com #
Life In The USA Is Just Like I Thought vagabondjourney.com #
This is the most expensive plane ticket in the world - Etihad a380 the residence m.youtube.com #
Send an Email Alert When Your Disk Space Gets Low linuxjournal.com #
BBC could restrict journalists’ use of Twitter theguardian.com #
Mozilla - More Questions About .org blog.mozilla.org #
The Origin Story of Container Queries css-tricks.com #
Dip Your Toes Into Hardware With WebMIDI - Some great ccs tricks articles this week css-tricks.com #
The real scam of ‘influencer’ seths.blog #
Apple is reportedly working on a secret satellite communications project geekwire.com #
A software-defined radio is a radio implemented with reconfigurable software - “Software-defined radios offer the allure of instant reconfigurability in every dimension: frequency, modulation, and protocol. In theory, you would simply run a different program to implement an entirely different radio - whether it’s a FM broadcast receiver, a UMTS handset, or a Bluetooth device” luaradio.io #
The modern web is becoming an unusable, user-hostile wasteland - Comprehensive roundup of a lot of the issues seen on a daily basis that make browsing the web a horrible experience in 2019 omarabid.com #
Is Web Design Easier or Harder Than it was 10 Years Ago? css-tricks.com #
Mozilla make improvements to their Reality browser blog.mozvr.com #
This Page is Designed to Last - A Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web jeffhuang.com #
The Man Who Reads 1,000 Articles a Day - Probably not a massive surprise that I found this quite interesting superorganizers.substack.com #
Bear - Write beautifully on iPhone, iPad, and Mac bear.app #
Chrome 80 - Content Indexing for PWAs, ES Modules for workers and More blog.chromium.org #
Schedule AWS Lambda Functions Using CloudWatch Events docs.aws.amazon.com #
A pretty good round up of use cases where Node.js is a good fit, there’s a lot of variety so it’s vaguely useful to have a broad understanding of what is possible simform.com #
UK to create regulator to police big tech companies ft.com #
Jack Dorsey Just UNFOLLOWED Mark Zuckerberg - I’m mildly ashamed that my initial reaction to this news was OMG gizmodo.com #
Spotify’s Tastebuds feature will let you explore your friends’ music tastes theverge.com #
I just spent the whole day trying to get Safari bookmarks onto my iOS device, previously you could sync them using iTunes, I've been doing that for years, but now that doesn't work, and it seems you have to use iCloud - Since iCloud bookmark sync is basically impossible, eventually I just emailed an HTML export file to myself, opened each link one by one and added each one as a bookmark one by one in Safari on iOS - On the one hand pretty tedious, but soon I will be able to do it while ziping around in a self driving car apple.com #
Mac Pro 2019 Teardown - Scores 9/10 on repairability - "An almost perfect machine" ifixit.com #
A Rare Russian Tech Triumph, a Police Raid and a Backlash - More on the recent Nginx controversy nytimes.com #
Billionaire Musk releases all Tesla patents to help save the Earth - The hope is that the 'open source philosophy' will accelerate the introduction of electric vehicles made by other manufacturers and thus have a much bigger positive environmental impact for the planet news.abs-cbn.com #
It’s Interesting to see that although a lot of folks have been forking Chromium lately, some people are also forking Firefox to create their own browser, this article outlines the reasons behind going that direction 0x65.dev #
Map of water ice on Mars shows where NASA (and SpaceX) are likely to send their first astronauts geekwire.com #
Apple Arcade annual subscription launches slashgear.com #
Occupation Growth and Decline flowingdata.com #
Your Makefiles are wrong - Nice tutorial, some tips on getting rid of the need for using tabs, I kind of want to try out some of my build processes with make tech.davis-hansson.com #
Cronhooks - Schedule one time or reoccurring webhooks - These webhook saas tools can be pretty useful when you are starting out building an app because integrating a scheduler into an app can be a lot of effort cronhooks.io #
I wish there was a way to choose between different recommendation algorithms on YouTube m.youtube.com #
Palantir Wins New Pentagon Deal With $111 Million From the Army bloomberg.com #
Google halts Chrome 79 rollout on Android after bug deletes user data zdnet.com #
On the undervalued notion of text-only websites zainamro.com #
A History of CSS Through Fifteen Years of 24 ways 24ways.org #
What I've learned over 10 years on Stack Overflow - I think a lot of what is mentioned in this article is on point, as a reader and occasional poster for about 10 years my initial reaction to having to post a question is extreme caution, I’m not sure that’s the intention of the people running the site (most likely it isn’t), but that’s how it is now for me, I’m even a bit worried posting this link (on my own linkblog!) blog.mattbierner.com #
This is the HN thread to the article I linked to earlier about text-only news, there’s some good topics discussed in there news.ycombinator.com #
The Oddly Comforting Allure of London’s Vintage Tube Textiles - It’s odd that all those years in London taking the tube and it never occurred to me that the seat patterns were retro stylish, they were just the slightly boring seats, but looking at them now I can see there is a certain style to them messynessychic.com #
DebConf 14 - QA with Linus Torvalds m.youtube.com #
Google Maps has now photographed 10 million miles in Street View cnet.com #
Apple and Spotify can now play podcasts on your Alexa-enabled devices - I guess if you are into Alexa then this is pretty cool theverge.com #
Google Culture War Escalates as Era of Transparency Wanes - I hope they figure this out, I know there is a lot of headwinds for Google recently, but overall I still like Google, they have some great products and they are in so many countries, that's a really hard thing todo - Maybe there is a maximum size for a company with a Google type culture, well ok then lets have more of those instead of a few massive mega corps running the world bloomberg.com #
Stonehenge 1875 family photo may be earliest at monument bbc.com #
The cowardice of Brave - A rather scathing critique of the new Brave browser business model, my thoughts so far about Brave can be broadly described as ‘caution’, I don’t really understand the business model, I think it’s a healthy discussion to be having, because a lot of people have been switching practicaltypography.com #
Everybody calling the Cybertruck "brutalist" is wrong - I liked this article a lot including this description of the car “It’s the equivalent of a cultural somersault” inverse.com #
An article about the use of “Link In Bio” - Perhaps that’s what I should have called the linkblog globe icon feature, I wasn’t aware at the time that it was a common way to call that feature, and there aren’t any user bios at the moment - I agree about the importance of outbound links for the open web anildash.com #
The English language is finally losing its grip on the internet wired.co.uk #
There’s a quantum computer bullshit detector twitter account causing a stir - my take on the whole quantum calculator stuff - show us something that does more good in the world than a cat gif, then I’ll be a bit more interested, maybe not the best metric but I am but a lowly web developer wired.com #
Leaders from Seattle’s ‘boring’ unicorns on staying private and their most important lessons learned - Sometimes I feel like in tech you either have to run a unicorn company or work for a unicorn company, where is the spectrum and diversity? In the real world this would be like walking down the street in a normal/average sized town and every single shop would be a Walmart geekwire.com #
Is there dark matter at the center of the Milky Way? - Based on this article, I’m not convinced these scientists are fully aware of their assumptions, using fakes to ascertain the truth is very tricky business m.phys.org #
Google Assistant can now interpret 44 languages on Android and iOS - It's a live translation with auto-suggestions for replies to help speed up the conversation techspot.com #
Google has setup a free phone line in India where you call and can ask questions and get Alexa style answers, so people without internet access can get information similar to doing a google search - Sort of reminds me of the speaking clock, but for knowledge techspot.com #
Russian police raid NGINX Moscow office - Can't say I'm entirely surprised by this news, it was pretty much the only part of my tech stack that hadn't had some major controversy, Nginx is really great software I wish them all the best, I hope they find a way to keep the software open source zdnet.com #
In what is presumably completely unrelated to the nginx news, I saw a live russian band play an outdoor concert this evening, they played some great russian folk music interspersed by some covers played in a russian folk music style, their cover of ACDC's Thunderstruck was like some sort weird but brilliant echo through time, I felt as though I was at the russian folk concert but superimposed ontop of an invisible massive ACDC stadium rock concert youtube.com #
Firefox 71 released - It's got a collection of some of the best new features and improvements that I have seen in a browser release, especially if you are a javascript developer - web sockets message inspector, network full-text search, console multi-line editor mode, inline variable preview in debugger, Promise.allSettled(), Media Session API, log on event listeners, also a bunch of CSS features hacks.mozilla.org #
Chrome 79 released - Lots of new security features, tab freezing looks interesting, back-forward caching, also interested to see the UI update to clearly show if you are signed into Chrome or not zdnet.com #
Jack Dorsey Wants to Help You Create Your Own Twitter wired.com #
My internet connectivity is unbelievably horrendous, sites barely load, just did a speed test - 0.76 Mbps download and 30 Mbps upload - not a lot I can do with that, a little bit one sided me thinks, no YouTube no podcasts, even my git remote commands hang half the time en.m.wikipedia.org #
Node.js & MongoDB - How to Implement Transactions mongodb.com #
Electron joins the OpenJS Foundation openjsf.org #
George Laurer co-inventor of the barcode dies at 94 bbc.com #
Daring Fireball T-Shirts and Hoodies - Makes me want to have some Linkblog merchandise daringfireball.net #
osxfuse is no longer open source colatkinson.site #
Twitter backing initiative for open and decentralized standard for social media - They plan to hire a small team to work on the standard mobile.twitter.com #
A big part of linkblog is the ability to see the context taround a link, to see the other links that were posted on that day. It’s been possible to link directly to a day in your linkblog since the beginning. But until now, it hasn’t been possible to link directly to a specific message in a day.
For example here is the link to yesterday in my linkblog. These day urls are copyable from the hash link (#) next to each day.
The latest feature is the ability to link directly to a specific message in a day. When the page loads from a highlightable message url, the message that is specified in the url will momentarily be highlighted. After a few seconds the highlight will fade back to the regular linkblog page. This strikes a good balance between being able to point directly at a specific message while also keeping the context around the message focussed.
After loading a linkblog using a highlightable message url you will know which message was being referenced but also be able to see clearly the context of that message. Note that you have to have javascript enabled in your browser for the feature to work.
One challenge implementing this feature was how to do it while minimising the effects on the linkblog page. Adding a clickable element next to each message on the page to copy the url to the clipboard would negatively impact the minimalism and readability of the page. For the moment the way to get a highlightable message url is from the search page.
Each message in the search page results has a highlightable message url as the hash link. Since most often users will probably be searching for the most recent messages, I’ve updated the search page so that performing a search with an empty search box returns all the messages with latest listed first.
I hope you enjoy the new feature!
CSS Architecture for Modern JavaScript Applications css-tricks.com #
Tesla Cybertruck in LEGO boingboing.net #
New Post: New Linkblog feature: highlightable messages blog.markjgsmith.com #
It All Starts with a Humble